Alain Aspect
Professor at the École Polytechnique and at the Institut d’Optique, Palaiseau; Distinguished Senior Researcher at Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), France
Breaking the Wall of Quantum Weirdness. How Experiments Reveal Photon Schizophrenia.
The concepts of quantum physics are outrageously counterintuitive. How is it possible that an event happening at one location affects an event at another location without any obvious connection between the two? Alain Aspect (1947) calls this the weirdness of quantum physics, a field he has revolutionized in the past thirty years. While working towards his Ph.D. at the Institut d’Optique d’Orsay, he launched his Bell’s inequalities Test Experiments: Aspect discovered that particles are able to instantaneously keep contact with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are ten feet or ten billion miles apart, somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. But settling a seventy-year-old dispute between Bohr and Einstein is only one of the numerous achievements of the recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal. Aspect has also prompted the chase for another milestone in contemporary physics: the Wheeler’s delayed choice test of wave-particle duality, a direct evidence of the schizophrenic behavior of light. The amazing results of such experiments may well transform technologies for exchanging and processing information, and thus our information and communication based society. In fact, the weirdness of quantum physics could even change our views of microscopic reality.
